Yes, I think that this is on purpose, since the original defn of a ton was used for the displacement of water in a ship. According to www.thefreedictionary.com/ton , a "ton" is also a unit of _volume_ in shipping -- either 35, 40 or 100 cubic feet. 35 cubic feet is approx one cubic meter. I recall from high school chemistry that a cubic foot of water is 64#, so 64*35 = 2240#, which is the definition of a "long ton". At 10:04 AM 9/20/2005, wrote:
Henry wrote:
<< 177 million tons should be the weight of a small comet or a decent size meteor (see <http://www.meteorcrater.com/eventsfun/exptheimp.htm>www.meteorcrater.com/eventsfun/exptheimp.htm). I'm not sure that whether the meteor was iron or water would make much difference in the resulting crater.
In discussions about this, a surprising factoid I learned is that the volume of 1 ton of ice is almost exactly 1 cubic meter. This is an easy rough estimate, but I'd never thought of doing it before. At first blush, that a ton of ice should be a mere cubic meter was amazing to me. (Either a ton is a lot smaller than it seems, or a cubic meter is much bigger.)
--Dan